


A Broken Window

by inadistantworld



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Love, Short & Sweet, probably annoying symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 05:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19267150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inadistantworld/pseuds/inadistantworld
Summary: Vex and Percy talk about how they never told their mothers what they wanted to be when they grew up.





	A Broken Window

**Author's Note:**

> Hope I wrote something worth reading. Been an idea I've been circling for a while now.

“I never told my mother I wanted to be a clockmaker.” Percy’s voice was a quiet kind of shattered. It was a million pieces of stained glass on the floor of a church older than memory. Broken but settled. Even with loving, painstaking restoration he would never be the same as before.

“Really?” Vex’ahlia laced her fingers through his, her shoulder pressed against his and their backs against the trunk of a tree so large that it reminded her of the Feywild even if it was only a half hour walk into the Parchwood.

“I wasn’t hiding it or anything,” the sound of pieces of glass being blown around by a strong gust of wind, “I’m sure she knew. I made my father a pocket watch for Winter’s Crest once and I was constantly reading about clocks and working on my own. It wasn’t a secret or anything, I just…I never actually told her.”

Vex was quiet for a long time. Percy was more than happy with that, he hadn’t been looking for an answer or a reassurance, sometimes they just said things they never told anyone else. Sometimes they needed help processing and sometimes they just needed to say it, and it had been the latter for Percy.

“I never told Mama I wanted to be a pirate.” She sounded less like shattered glass and much more like the whistle of wind through a broken window. Unexpected, unprepared, light and gentle and more than a little sorrowful.

Percy smiled and looked over at his wife, so incredibly funny and gentle with him, who was telling him something she had never told anyone else. “Really?” He asked her.

She let her cheek rest on his shoulder, “Really.” She was the heartbreaking sound of a breeze scraped raw by the jagged pieces of the world, a gust of wind looking for respite in a church older than memory, a place where she could rest from her endless journey. “She probably didn’t guess that though. I think she probably still thought I was going to be a pilot of a skyship, which was I told her I was going to be before we went with my father.”

“You would have made a brilliant pirate,” he remarked gently.

“I know,” she said with the beginnings of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “I had it all planned out. The ship would be called The Vagabond and I would be the captain. Vax would have come too, riding the waves of my success as my first mate,” she squeezed his hand and for a moment her voice was sharp with pain still too fresh, then she continued. “It was what I thought about all the time when we were in Syngorn. I wanted to travel the world and I wanted to be captain of a ship and find treasure and do amazing things like have swordfights with other pirates. It’s not exactly as practical as clockmaker, but I think about what she would have said all the time. I think she would have bought me a hat.”

“A pirate and a clockmaker,” Percy mused and brought her knuckles to his lips and pressed a soft kiss to her skin. “Here I am, after all this time I’m making clocks and after all this time you are travelling the world and finding treasure and doing absolutely spectacular things like beating almost gods.”

“All I need is the ship,” Vex said teasingly.

“All you need to do is ask,” Percy replied, because he had never turned her down once since they met and he had no intention of starting now.

They were quiet again. Somewhere in a long-forgotten church a breeze gently moved over pieces of colorful glass and the sound that came through the window was sad but perhaps a little more hopeful.

“I wish I had been able to tell her,” Vex finally said, because she told Percy things she told no one else.

“I’m not entirely sure if my mother would have liked a watch, but I think she would have found a place to put an obscenely large grandfather clock if I had made one for her.”

“I would have demanded my hat be bigger than Vax’s, I was going to be captain after all.”

Percy laughed and the sound filled the air she owned as if it had been designed to do so. “Dear, you would have been a teenager and—”

“And my hat would have been bigger,” she finished for him with a wide grin. “I can only imagine what kind of things you made as a child, were they as gaudy as I believe they were?”

“I was raised around ornate, gilded, and fashionable décor so that when visiting nobles came we could show them how wealthy and important we were. I am positive that I would have made this clock the crowning piece of our collection. You would have hated it,” he assured her with bright eyes that told her just how clearly he could see it in his mind.

“You should make it. We could put it in the entryway or something, wherever she would have put it to show it off.” And the gentle breeze pushed two pieces of glass back together, not mending them or fixing them but connecting them after so long apart, beginning to build, if nothing else, a new piece of art out of the pieces left.

“You should get a ship,” he said for an answer. “It could smaller if you like, if you don’t want to hire a crew. We could even get you a hat.” What does shattered glass do for the breeze? What does a broken window do for the wind on a ceaseless, tiring journey? It gives it a place to stay, a place to rest, a place to call home before setting off for a little more adventure and it gives it a place to return when it grows tired again.

 

And across the planes in a world that neither Percy or Vex would see until many many years after a hideous clock stared down guests when they opened the door or Vex became the captain of a small boat that fit a handful of people and the occasional raven looking for a little adventure, Elaina and Johanna sat together over ethereal tea and chatted about their children and who they had once meant to be and who they had come to be and there was nothing but pride and love and admiration from them both.


End file.
